Chapter 15 #2
“If you want my honest opinion. My family was not, ah. Particularly enthusiastic about me playing hockey. When I was little, sure, they were fine with it. Cute, even. Their little tomboy out on the rink. The whole package was charming for them as long as I was nine years old. The moment my designation was confirmed Omega, however, that affection went out the window in a hurry. Omegas do not play hockey, Iris. Omegas do not skate against boys, Iris. Omegas do not stay on the ice past sixteen, Iris.” She tips the fan up another inch.
“So it kind of became a rebellion thing, if I am honest. The longer I stayed in the sport, the less they were willing to fund any part of it. Including, eventually, basic things like a phone.”
The boutique’s expensive perfumed air feels, suddenly, several degrees colder than the thermostat is responsible for.
Rémi does not move, but his eyes have gone fractionally darker.
Jude’s jaw has done its smallest motion.
I do not, because I am the man with the running mouth in this trio, let any of it show on my face.
I simply lift one hand and tuck a damp pink strand behind her ear, casually, like a man brushing lint off a sweater, and watch her cheeks colour in real time.
Noted. The blood of every adult in the O’Shea family postcode is, professionally speaking, on my list.
“Miss?” The technician returns. “You are all set. Screen protector applied. Case you selected has been fitted, and — I do not say this often — the latest model in pink. This is actually the only one we had in this color in the entire city.”
Iris turns, slowly, and her entire face does the thing.
The thing where her eyes go enormous and storm-grey and the corners of her mouth lift in a slow, undisguised wonder that she has not yet learned how to put a wall up around.
She accepts the phone from the technician with both hands as though it were a small bird.
She brings it level with her face. She looks at the pink case.
She looks at the screen. She looks at the soft rose-gold ring on the back of the device, which I one-hundred-percent suggested to the associate while she was three feet down the counter studying a stand of charging cables and refusing to participate in this part of the transaction.
She does not realize, in this moment, that I would build her a temple for that face.
“Thank you,” she breathes, to the air around me in general. “Oh my God. Thank you. This is — thank you.”
She looks up at me, suddenly fierce.
“You three are getting put in this phone first. As contacts. Before anyone else. Before
Rémi’s millimeter smile makes its appearance. Jude’s mouth lifts at one corner. My own face, I cannot speak for, but I imagine it is the face of a man who has accepted he is, with no further discussion, very much in trouble.
“I will put us in for you,” I tell her, holding out my hand. “While we go get ice cream.”
“Ice creaaaammmm?”
The way it comes out of her, breathlessly, two octaves higher than her normal speaking voice, is going to ruin entire weekends of mine.
“Ice cream,” I confirm, and offer my other hand, palm up, casual as anything.
She smirks. She tries very, very hard not to look as excited as she clearly is.
She loses. She slides her hand into mine, small and cool and faintly damp from the fan, and Jude thanks the associate behind us, and Rémi taps a metal card on the reader without checking the total, and the four of us spill back out onto the street as a unit for the first time since we entered this store, and the unit-ness of it, I will be honest, does something low in my chest that I am not in a hurry to dissect.
People look.
That is the part that gets me. The city we are in is a city that does not normally do double-takes, because it is engineered for the kind of beautiful young pack-shaped configurations that walk through its boutiques every Saturday and never raise an eyebrow.
And yet pedestrians on this sidewalk are clocking us, in pairs, in clusters, the small wide-eyed registrations of people watching what they cannot quite name.
Three Alphas. One small pink-haired Omega between them.
Holding the inner one’s hand. The defenseman on her open side at a half-step behind, the captain on her other shoulder.
The diamond formation people have apparently been waiting their whole adult lives to see in a wild population.
It is, weirdly, empowering. I do not have a vocabulary for it yet. I will be writing one.
“We should do a movie night,” I announce, swinging her hand a fraction in mine. “Tonight. The four of us. Jude picks.”
“How about no,” Jude says, mildly.
“We have not done one in months,” Rémi notes, from the other side. “Why not.”
“I agree with Rémi.”
“Of course you agree, Santori. You brought it up.”
“Iris.” Rémi, neutrally. “You into movies.”
“I usually do not have time for them.” She is craning her neck up at me, then at Rémi, like a small pink switchboard operator. “But if you guys are not doing anything tonight, sure. Sign me up.”
“I will handle popcorn,” I offer.
“Okay. Inventory check.” I squeeze her fingers. “Ice cream is on the next block. Shopping is done. You said you needed blockers, Pinky?”
She pauses.
Actually pauses, mid-stride, which causes the four-person diamond formation to fold in around her in a small unscripted collision while she frowns up at me, thinking.
“Honestly, I am not sure if I am supposed to buy those out here, or whether I have to go to the campus clinic for them. I have already put my name on the waitlist.”
“Waitlist for what,” Rémi asks.
“The Heat Clinic.”
Three of us stop. Properly stop. I have not, in the course of this morning, witnessed Jude Kavanagh and Rémi Bellerose come to a coordinated halt on a public sidewalk at the same time, and now I have, and the effect on the foot-traffic behind us is roughly that of two cars stalling on a freeway.
Iris blinks up at all three of us.
“… What.”
“There is a waitlist,” I repeat, very carefully, “for a clinic. That helps you. With heats.”
“Apparently?” She shrugs, the new phone clutched against her sternum like a lifeline.
“I do not know exactly how it works. I assume there is some standing pool of Alphas who are, ah, on-call when an Omega goes in. Mrs. Henderson at the housing desk said to put my name on the list before it filled further. I have not had a Heat in a long time because of the blockers anyway, so it is not, like, an urgent thing for me. But she said to do it. So I did it.”
“Iris.” Jude. Quiet. Dangerous.
“Why do you sound angry.”
“Why do you sound,” he counters, “like this does not bother you in the slightest.”
She thinks about it. Tips her head. “… Because it does not. I do not have a choice in the matter. Why would I be angry about a thing I have no control over.”
Oh, Pinky.
“You do have control.” I bring our joined hands up, deliberately, so she has to look at them. “You do not have to sign up for that. There is no part of the league regulation or the school code that compels you to be on that list. Henderson handed you a worksheet and you assumed it was law.”
“Yes,” she says, slowly, “I do have to sign up. How else am I supposed to remain on the team if my heats are all over the place? Before, you know, your friendly half of the program continues to use it as an argument that I am a hindrance.”
Rémi steps closer. He does not crowd her. He simply puts himself, again, in the position he has been putting himself in since the moment she walked into our farmhouse, which is on her open side and well within scenting distance. His pine-and-snow lays itself over our small huddle like a hush.
“Iris.”
She looks up at him.
“We can help you with your heat.” Rémi’s voice does not climb. He simply makes the sentence the room. “If you do not want to deal with that situation with strangers who are treating it as a paid shift, you have other options. Three of them, in fact. Standing right here.”
She breathes in. She breathes out. Her eyes flicker over Rémi’s face, then to Jude’s, and then — because she is Iris O’Shea, and because I have, in the last few days, become the person she finds the floor with when the room tilts — they slide to me.
Asking. With absolutely no idea she is asking.
“If you are looking for my opinion, Pinky,” I tell her, quiet, “you already know mine. And the boys know perfectly well I am too stubborn to be talked out of getting my way once I want it. So whether they agree or not is, frankly, between them and their consciences.”
Jude pinches the bridge of his nose. Rémi, on her other side, lets the corner of his mouth do the unmistakable thing.
“… Okay.” Iris’s voice is small. Not afraid. Thinking. “Can I think about it.”
“Yes,” Rémi says, immediately.
“Take your time, sweetheart,” I add. “Just know it is on the menu. That is the entire point of the menu. It is not a binding order.”
She nods. Once, twice, the small considering nod of a woman whose mental spreadsheet has just gained a column she had not budgeted for.
“One more question,” Jude says.
“Yes, sir.”
“What are the side effects of those blockers you are taking.”
“Oh.” She thinks about it. “I do not actually know what the new stronger ones do, since I have not started them yet. My current ones, though, are pretty mild. Hot flashes occasionally. Some disorientation. Spotting. The very occasional, fully manageable panic attack. Nothing crazy.”
Three sets of eyes lock onto her like targeting reticles.
“Iris.”
“What?”
“You are not actually serious.” I have stopped walking. “You are not standing on this sidewalk listing
She pauses.
She raises a hand, mid-air, in the universal gesture of
“It is,” she says, very carefully, “only about a thirty-five-percent increase. With prolonged use. Which my prescriber went over with me extensively, so it is not, like, a surprise. I am informed.”
Silence.
The kind of silence that has, in the past, preceded actual fights.
Fucking. Christ.
“STOP THE BLOCKERS,” the three of us declare, in roughly the same fraction of a second.
She blinks at us. Genuinely.
“I cannot. That would be detrimental for the team.”
“Who,” Jude says, in the precise voice he uses when a player has come off the ice with an injury they were trying to hide, “gives the slightest, smallest fuck about the team over your health, O’Shea.”
“I mean.” She looks at us like we have asked her to do long division in a foreign currency. “Everyone? That is sort of the whole arrangement? I do not, like, matter to this institution otherwise.”
Three of us, on a public sidewalk in a forty-five-minute commuter city in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, stop functioning.
I cannot — even now, watching her say it with the casual lightness of a woman reporting the weather — fully process the sentence.
Rémi’s entire shoulders have gone tight.
Jude’s jaw has done a thing I do not have the file for.
The sound of her saying out loud, in front of God and the Saturday foot traffic of this overpriced shopping district, that she does not
Oh, Iris, no.
And then, with the supernatural timing of a small mercy from a god I do not strictly believe in, the cheerful pre-recorded jingle of an ice cream truck floats up the street.
Iris’s head snaps toward it.
Her entire face transforms, the gravity of the previous sixty seconds washing off her like a tide retreating, and her eyes go enormous, and she lifts up onto the toes of her boots like a small pink meerkat, and the sound that comes out of her is, frankly, illegal.
“ICE CREAM TRUCK?”
Rémi exhales. Jude’s jaw releases a fraction. I let her hand drop from mine just long enough for her to do a small thrilled bounce.
“Do they — oh my God, do you think they have a strawberry banana split? Out here? Do they sell those in Minnesota?” She is patting her pockets in the immediate animal motion of a person looking for cash.
Her face falls a half-degree. “Wait. Fuck. I do not — I do not carry cash, of course I do not carry cash, who carries cash in this econ —”
I am already reaching for my own pocket.
I make eye contact with Rémi, briefly, then with Jude.
The three of us share, without anyone needing to say a word, the precise telegraphic look pack-brothers share when they have decided, in tandem, that the next item on the agenda is, in fact, ice cream.
The forty-five-minute drive home will be plenty of time to begin the considerably less fun conversation about blockers and clinics and the simple unworkable fact that the woman we have collectively decided to stand between and the world is, in her own bones, convinced she does not matter outside an arena.
I pull a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket, snap it once in front of her face, and tuck it between her fingers.
“Why do we not,” I say, easily, “go get some ice cream?”
She lights up like the truck has been parked at the end of the universe for her, specifically, since the moment she was born.
She squeezes the twenty in one hand and the new phone in the other and bounces twice on the balls of her feet, and the three of us watch her go off down the sidewalk a few strides ahead of us, beelining for the painted side-window of the truck with the small uncomplicated joy of a person who is, for one rare three-block stretch, allowed to want a simple thing.
Jude falls into step on my left. Rémi on my right.
Neither of them says a word. They do not have to.
The look that passes between the three of us at the back of her is a treaty.
This conversation is not over.
But for now, the only way for Pinky to understand we actually care is through action. Not bullshit.